


Setting the World to Rights

by myrtlebroadbelt



Category: Misfits (TV 2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Drug Use, Explicit Language, Gen, Immortality, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Post-Apocalypse, Suicidal Thoughts, Temporary Character Death, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 03:24:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19220581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myrtlebroadbelt/pseuds/myrtlebroadbelt
Summary: The world ending two days before Nathan was due to finish his community service was bad enough. But being the only person to survive it? That was just fucked up.In which life goes on, in more ways than one.





	1. Chapter 1

The world ending two days before Nathan was due to finish his community service was bad enough. But being the only person to survive it? That was just fucked up.

He hadn’t survived at first, of course. He died with the rest of them, in whatever disaster it was that turned everything into a pile of rubble. That was the bad thing about everyone on earth dying at once — nobody was around to write newspaper articles about it, so that immortal twats like Nathan knew whether they should blame an atomic bomb or an alien invasion or a giant meteor for their eternal misfortune.

They were all in the locker room when it happened. Nathan was in the midst of zipping up his jumpsuit when a cloud of dust fell from the ceiling onto his head. Seconds later, the ground was shaking, and they all collapsed in a heap on the floor.

“What the fuck’s going on?” Kelly screamed as a chunk of ceiling tile dropped beside her.

“It’s a bloody earthquake!” Nathan cried, covering his head with his arms.

“What if it’s another storm?” Simon said, though they could barely hear him over the rumbling.

The lockers started wobbling, and one toppled over an inch away from Curtis. They all scrambled toward the door, but it was too late. The last thing Nathan remembered was pushing Alisha out of the way as a row of lockers hurtled toward them.

He woke up with his ears ringing. He was slumped against the wall, and the first thing he saw when he blinked his eyes open was a can of Lynx Africa, lying on the floor with the cap off. He lifted himself up on one elbow and realized that the rest of Simon’s things were scattered nearby, with his mangled locker overturned beside them.

The light in the room was strange, and Nathan looked up to find that almost the entire roof was missing. He could see the sky overhead, although it was unlike any sky he had ever seen — a sickly mixture of yellow and purple, less like a sunset and more like a black eye. Not even the storm had been this ominous.

Nathan struggled to his feet and heard something crunch beneath his shoe. Looking down, he saw one of the room’s light fixtures lying in pieces on the tile, wet with blood. Perhaps that’s what killed him. Or maybe it was the locker, or that plus the locker, or any other combination of flying or falling objects. That was kind of irrelevant now, he supposed.

He caught a glimpse of himself in what was left of the wall mirror. His face and hair were grey with dust. It hovered in the air as well, and he covered his mouth with the collar of his T-shirt as he turned around to take in the room.

There was nothing about this place that he recognized. It was like a photo of a bomb site in a history textbook. There hadn’t been much color there to begin with, but what little there was had disappeared. He felt like he was in a backwards _Wizard of Oz_.

“Anybody here?” he asked, and the sound of his own voice startled him — everything else was so quiet.

Nathan saw a flash of orange and rushed toward it. Alisha was lying face-down across an overturned row of lockers. Somewhere in the commotion, her ankle monitor had been smashed. It lay on the floor near her feet, one of which was missing a shoe.

“Hey,” he said, kneeling down and patting her wrist. “You okay?”

When he realized he was touching her skin, he jerked his hand away, but quickly understood what it meant that her power hadn’t kicked in. That’s when he noticed the thick smear of blood matting the hair at the crown of her head, and the football-sized slab of concrete with a matching stain.

“Shit,” Nathan said under his breath as he scanned the rest of the room for a sign of the others.

He found them all eventually, stumbling over bricks and dented lockers and crumbling drywall as he went. Kelly was buried so far under debris that all he could see was her hand. Two of her long, lavender-varnished nails had broken off in whatever avalanche of building materials had killed her.

Curtis had made it farthest to the door, the athletic prick, but the ceiling had apparently caved in on him before he could escape. Simon, meanwhile, appeared to have had a succession of three lockers fall on him like a game of dominoes. The idiot had actually taken his phone out to film it — it was clutched in his hand, the screen shattered.

It didn’t feel real. At this point, Nathan expected to die. But he took it for granted that the others would be saved — whether by Curtis’s power, or that guy in the mask, or just sheer dumb luck. He knew he should be crying, or bloodying his hands trying to dig them out. But he was too busy waiting for something to happen that would change things.

In the meantime, he supposed he should see what was going on outside. He found it strange that there were no sirens. Wasn’t that usually the go-to soundtrack to these types of situations? And while he was on the subject, why hadn’t a first responder shown up yet to carry him out of the rubble and wrap him up like a burrito in a space blanket?

He got his answer when he stepped through the locker room door — or what was left of it. The rest of the community centre was just as annihilated, and the front wall had been completely knocked out, giving Nathan the perfect view of what lay outside.

And what lay outside was fuck all.

Towers had toppled to the ground, cars had been overturned, and the lake was half-empty with rubbish floating in it. In the distance, something was on fire. Wertham had always been pretty bleak, but this version made the old one look like paradise.

The world was in ruins, and there were no ambulances. Which probably meant there was no one around to drive the ambulances or dispatch the ambulances or even call the ambulances in the first place.

“You have got to be shitting me,” Nathan said to no one in particular, since no one in particular seemed to exist.

An immortal man, alone at the end of the world. It would be poetic, if it were happening in a poem and not in Nathan’s actual fucking life.

He navigated his way through the rubble and into what was once the car park. A tree had been uprooted and fallen into one of the cars. The bins where they had once hidden to spy on the probation worker looked like beer cans that had been crushed in someone’s giant fist.

Then there was the sofa — the one from the roof. It had fallen, much like Nathan did on that cloudy day when he first died. The upholstery was torn and it was covered in dust, but it had managed to land perfectly upright. It was, strangely, the only thing that didn’t look out of place. It had been a while since it was in anyone’s sitting room, after all, and there wasn’t really much difference between the roof and the car park when you got down to it.

Nathan shook the dust out of his hair and walked over to it. With a sigh, he sat down, lit a cigarette, and settled in for eternity.

 

People in films always had a scruffy dog or a talking volleyball to keep them company in these kinds of situations, but Nathan didn’t even have a pet cockroach. He had once tried to have a conversation with a ceramic elephant he found, but ended up smashing it on the ground when it called him a cunt.

Not even the ghosts hung around for longer than twenty-four hours.

Kelly had been the first to show herself. Nathan had barely been sitting in the car park for five minutes when he heard her voice behind him. Stupidly, he believed she was alive. He didn’t need an explanation, just leapt over the back of the sofa and ran to her with his arms out.

He face-planted on the asphalt.

“I’m dead, Nathan,” Kelly told him.

“Yeah, I kind of figured,” Nathan said, turning over, “what with the whole running straight through you thing.”

He sat up on his elbows and looked at her. She was in her jumpsuit, her hair scraped back into a braid, a tangle of necklaces at her collar — just as she was when she died. How could he have missed her so much after only a few minutes?

They sat on the sofa in silence for a while as Nathan chain-smoked. When he finished his fourth cigarette, Kelly spoke up: “You sure you wanna smoke those all at once?”

It took Nathan a few seconds to suss out her meaning. When he did, he lit another cigarette. “I’m gonna run out eventually. What difference does it make if it’s now or a hundred years from now?”

Kelly opened her mouth as if to reply, then closed it and returned to studying the horizon. That’s when the rest of them showed up, three dots of orange on an apocalypse-colored background.

“What the hell happened?” Curtis asked.

Nathan shrugged. “The world ended.”

They hung out in the car park until the sun went down, swapping theories and sharing what they remembered of their deaths. They avoided the immortality conversation, which Nathan appreciated. He would have plenty of time to think about it — too much time — and he didn’t feel like starting now.

It struck Nathan just how dark it was without any street lamps. He couldn’t even see his own hand in front of his face, let alone the ghosts gathered round him. He would have to find a torch tomorrow, he thought as he lay his head back on the sofa and closed his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Nathan,” he heard Simon say just before he fell asleep.

And when a ghost apologizes to you, you know you’re in some deep shit.

When Nathan woke up the next morning, they were all gone. He searched everything that was left of the community centre, calling their names until they echoed mockingly off the crumbling walls. No one answered.

Outside the locker room, Nathan fell to his knees and cried so hard he thought he would die of suffocation. He wasn’t sure what he expected. None of the other ghosts had stayed for very long, so why should they be any different? Just because they were his best friends? Just because he didn’t want to be alone forever? Just because he had so much to say, and no one to say it to?

If this was off the A-list, then fuck the bloody A-list.

 

Six months on, Nathan was rummaging through his hundredth bedside table. It’s how he spent most of his time these days, when he wasn’t wanking, or eating beans out of a can, or slogging his way through _Sense & Sensibility_, which was the only book from the community centre library that had made it through in one piece.

He was looking for anything he could possibly use, and one thing in particular.

It had taken an embarrassingly long time for his mind to flash back to the container club, and Jamie’s pills, and the way his eyes seemed to zoom in and out like a camera lens when the dose finally kicked in. Most importantly, he remembered something Simon had said to him when he was leaving the toilets. It had barely registered at the time, but now it was like Simon was right there next to him, shouting in his ear.

“Nathan, make sure you don’t get killed!”

It turned out there actually was a way out of this ass crack of a situation, and it started with the letter E.

Nathan uncovered an eighth of marijuana in the back corner of the overfull bedside drawer and pocketed it. He had found enough skunk to last him until the next apocalypse, but people were apparently more careful about hiding their ecstasy.

He sifted through the rest of the drawer’s useless crap — condoms, a wad of cash, a Bible — until he spotted an iPod with tangled earphones attached. Nathan’s had run out of juice after two days, and he was sick of listening to his own voice singing through everything he could remember of the catalog.

He pulled it out and turned it on, praying that the battery hadn’t died. When the screen lit up, he nearly burst into tears. Now to find out what kind of taste this guy had.

To put it simply, it blew. Nathan couldn’t believe he had survived the apocalypse only to have to read the word “Hoobastank” with his own two eyes. He was about to throw the thing across the room and get going, when one track caught his attention.

He put the earphones in, pressed play, and let the saxophonic opening of “Careless Whisper” carry him away.

He had his mum to blame for his love of George Michael. It was all she played when he was growing up. If he had the balls to actually go into what was left of her house, he might be able to find a childhood video of himself dancing to "Faith" in his dad’s leather jacket and sunglasses. Too bad he wouldn’t be able to play it.

Nathan sat down on the carpet and pulled his knees up to his chin, closing his eyes and swaying to the music. He thought of his mum, and nights out with the gang, and that time he tried to shag Simon. He thought of lying in his bed at home — or on his sorry excuse for a mattress in the community centre, or in his coffin six feet under — and hitting shuffle. He thought of taking on that virtue bitch, and that mental girl, and that guy who thought he was in a video game. He thought of living, and dying, and living, and dying, and on and on.

 _But now who’s gonna dance with me?  
_ _Please stay_

No need to hit so close to home, George.

He got through the entire five minutes of the song before the iPod abruptly died. It probably meant something, but Nathan couldn’t be arsed to figure out what.

He took out the earphones and tossed the iPod on the carpet. As he started to push himself up off the floor, his hand landed on a small plastic bag. He looked down, expecting it to be yet another eighth to add to his collection. But it was something else entirely — two somethings, to be exact, all round and yellow and waiting to be swallowed.

He picked up the bag like it contained a priceless artifact, afraid it would crumble in his hand if he lifted it too quickly. He felt the shape of the tablets through the plastic, and ran his thumb over the smiley face imprints.

Then he reached into the back of his jeans and pulled out his revolver.

He had found it, fully loaded, under his old neighbor’s mattress, not long after it happened. He had gone to check on his mum’s house, but when he saw the state of it, he couldn’t bring himself closer than the curb. So he went next door and turned the place upside down, shouting every swear word he knew.

Since then, he had used four of the bullets.

The first time, he was drunk on a dusty bottle of vodka and got the idea in his head that the apocalypse had reversed his power. He shot himself in the mouth and cursed himself the next morning — mostly because he’d spilled the rest of the vodka when he died.

The second time, he had broken his leg falling through the upper floor of a half-destroyed house he was scavenging. He wasn’t prepared to limp around in agony with nothing to show for it but a melting fruit and nut bar, so he pulled the gun out of his waistband without even trying to get up. He woke an hour later, good as new.

The other two times, he had swallowed what he believed to be ecstasy tablets, but which turned out to be a birth control pill and a Parma Violet. He unfortunately didn’t realize this until after he had already blown his brains out.

Nathan shook his head and put the gun back in his jeans. No, he wouldn’t do it here. Not in the smelly carcass of some junkie’s flat. He needed to go home.

The walk back to the community centre took at least twenty minutes, but Nathan remembered none of it. He spent the whole time focused on the bag in his pocket, reaching down every few seconds to make sure it was still there, feeling the weight of the gun at the small of his back.

When he got to the car park, he went straight to the collection of crates and cardboard boxes where he kept his food stash — mostly canned shit and expired crisps from the shattered vending machines. He grabbed a plastic bottle of water and sat down on the sofa, which was looking more and more grim with every suicide.

Nathan pulled the bag of tablets from his pocket. He sat there for at least five minutes, staring alternately between the drugs and the skyline.

Was it too soon? Should he wait a few decades, search for more survivors, flag down an alien spacecraft to take him away? Was he a pussy for being lonely? For being jealous of everyone who got to die, who didn’t have to survive against their will? Was he supposed to be here? Meant to do something important that he wouldn’t discover until a thousand years from now? Should he just suck it up and live?

Nathan took one of the tablets out of the bag and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger, turning the smiley face upside down and right side up again.

Fuck it.

He parted his lips and raised the tablet to his mouth, but was interrupted by someone shooting him in the back of the head.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Nathan gasped awake. He was slumped over on the sofa with a monster headache. At least they didn’t bury him, he thought as he caught his breath and looked out at the horizon, where the sun was starting to set. No need to hide a body when the rest of the human race has been wiped out.

Or not.

He supposed he should be more concerned with the fact that someone was around to kill him in the first place, rather than what they did with his body afterwards. He didn’t have much time to contemplate this new existential development, however, as he heard a voice behind him.

“Excuse me,” it said quietly.

Nathan jumped and fumbled for his gun. When he managed to get it free, twisting his T-shirt halfway up his torso in the process, he turned and pointed it over the back of the sofa. What he saw made him blink.

The person standing there was not who he would have expected. It was a girl, for starters. But she didn’t have a shaved head or a rifle on her back — like the kind of girl he’d imagine would shoot him in the head on sight. Instead, she was wearing a long, floral-patterned dress, and there was a small braid peeking out of her dark hair. A canvas bag was slung over her shoulder. She looked like she had just wandered off a commune.

“Who the fuck are you?” Nathan asked.

“Oh, please don’t shoot me,” the girl pleaded, holding up her hands. “I mean you no harm.”

Nathan’s finger trembled against the trigger. “You killed me.”

“Pardon?” she said in that mousey voice of hers, looking genuinely confused. “I assure you I did nothing of the sort.”

She was convincing, he’d give her that. Anyone else might have taken her sweet demeanor for innocence, but Nathan knew better. He’d dealt with her type before, and anyway, it had to have been her. He hadn’t come across a single living person in six months, and suddenly he was supposed to believe there were two of them walking around?

Still, as little as he trusted her, shooting someone other than himself didn’t really appeal to him at the moment — especially when he only had two bullets left. Even with so much experience, there was no guarantee he wouldn’t fuck up the first attempt, and he’d prefer to have a back-up.

He narrowed his eyes at the girl. “Why should I believe you?”

“Because you’re not dead?” she said, as though Nathan were mental. She squinted at him. “You do appear to be bleeding, though.”

Nathan brought his free hand to his head. There was blood — and most likely brains — in his hair. And more on the back of the sofa, he noticed out of the corner of his eye.

“Do you mind if I take a look?” she asked, taking a cautious step toward him. “I’m quite good with wounds.”

“Stay back,” Nathan ordered, and the girl stopped short. “Look, I was kind of in the middle of something here, and I’d rather not waste a bullet on you, so if you’ll kindly fuck off, how about we call it square?”

He looked down, expecting to find his ecstasy beside him on the sofa. Instead, he just found more blood and brains. He scrambled to his feet and turned over the cushions, but there was nothing there except snack crumbs and his wank sock.

Killing him was one thing, but stealing his only hope for escape was another. He rounded the sofa and came stomping toward the girl, who scampered backwards.

“Where the fuck is it?” Nathan demanded, still pointing the gun at her.

She cowered away from him. “Where’s what?”

“You stole it! Give it back!”

“I didn’t steal anything!”

Nathan tore the bag off her shoulder and shook out the contents — nothing but canned vegetables. He grabbed at the skirt of her dress, looking for a pocket where she might have hidden it. She slapped his hand away, and he raised the gun to her head.

“Give it back, or I swear to God I’ll —”

“I saw someone!” she shouted over him, eyes squeezed shut as the words poured out in a rush. “I saw someone else, someone other than us. He was older. He had a gun. I hid from him, not far from here, just before I found you.”

When Nathan didn’t say anything, she opened her eyes and stared up at him. She looked terrified.

He pulled the gun away from her head, but still pointed it at her. “If you’re fucking with me …”

“I’m not. I swear.”

He thought she might be trying to lead him into some sort of trap. Even if she was, he didn’t really have much choice but to trust her if he wanted his ecstasy back.

“All right, let’s go find him, then,” Nathan said. “Show me which way he went.”

“We can’t go now,” the girl said. “It’s nearly dark, and it’s impossible to see anything at night. We should wait until morning.”

“He’ll get away.”

“He won’t be able to see anything either. He’ll probably stop for the night.”

Nathan stared at her, chewing his lip. If she was really cold-blooded enough to kill him the first time, why wasn’t she trying it again now? Why would she even have come back here at all? He hadn’t done a thorough search, but she didn’t seem to be hiding a gun under that skirt, and she certainly didn’t have one in that tote bag.

“Fine,” he said, and dropped the gun to his side.

He gestured for her to sit down in the beat-up armchair adjacent to the sofa. He had tracked it down when the ghosts were there, to give them something to sit on. Alisha had curled up in it, while Curtis sat on the armrest. It was strange seeing someone else occupying it. To be fair, it was strange seeing anyone at all, doing anything, in or out of the chair.

“He didn’t even take my gun,” Nathan said, tucking the revolver back in his jeans and sitting on the sofa. He adopted a mafioso voice: “Leave the gun, take the ecstasy.”

“Ecstasy? That’s what you thought I stole?”

He nodded, grabbing his water bottle and a tattered flannel to clean the blood and brains off himself. He paused to take a long sip first, as dying left him parched.

“Are you a drug addict?” the girl asked.

“No,” Nathan snapped. Then his mind flashed through all the skunk he’d smoked in the past six months, and he added, “Well, not an ecstasy addict.”

“So why do you want it so badly?”

His jaw clenched. “None of your business.”

The girl didn’t question him further, only watched as he poured the rest of the water over his head. “Are you sure you’re not hurt?” she asked.

Nathan glanced at her from beneath wet curls. “Nah, this is just … residual.”

They sat there in silence as Nathan reached into one of the crates for a bottle of shampoo and squeezed half of it out onto his head. He scrubbed his fingers violently through his hair and rinsed away the suds with the contents of yet another water bottle. The girl flinched as he shook his head like a dog to dry off.

“What’s your name, anyway?” Nathan asked as he wiped behind his ears with the flannel.

“Daisy.”

“Of course it is,” he said. “That would probably be one of my top three guesses for what you’d be called. Along with Rainbow and River.”

Daisy looked down at her lap. “My middle name is River.”

“Ha, I knew it,” Nathan laughed — wow, that felt weird. “What do you suppose my name is, then?”

Daisy shrugged. “Rainbow?”

He laughed again — man, that felt _really_ weird. “Good one. Actually, it’s Nathan.”

He leaned forward and held out his hand. She eyed it for a moment and then shook it loosely. It was then Nathan realized that he hadn’t touched another living person in six months. Daisy must have come to the same realization, because they both took an uncomfortable amount of time to let go of each other.

“So how’d you survive?” Nathan asked when they finally pulled apart.

“It’s a long story.”

He sat back, crossed his legs, and put his hands behind his head. “Well, lucky for you, I’ve got nothing but time.”

Daisy sighed, settling into her chair. “You’re not going to believe me, but I have this … ability.”

“From the storm,” he said plainly.

Her eyes widened. Nathan found it incredible that he and the gang had somehow managed to be the only ones to encounter — and be killed, brainwashed, or kidnapped by — other people with powers.

“Yeah, I know about it,” he continued. “It gave a bunch of us superpowers. So what’s yours?”

“I can heal people by touching them,” Daisy said. “I was ready to go public with it. I wanted to heal the world. But then the world … well, ended.”

“So did you heal yourself?”

She nodded. “I was in the kitchen, making tea. Everything started shaking, and objects were flying across the room. A knife went into my stomach. I managed to pull it out, but I knew it was only a matter of time before I bled to death. So I touched the wound, and it healed.”

“What if you hadn’t taken it out, though?” Nathan asked.

“Pardon?”

“I mean, if you healed your wound, but the knife was still in your stomach, wouldn’t it just keep stabbing you, like a vicious cycle? Both times I was impaled, they took me off the thing before I came back, but I’ve always wondered …”

Daisy blinked. “I’m sorry … did you say you were … impaled?”

“Yeah. Twice, actually,” Nathan replied, and then slapped himself on the forehead when he saw her expression. “Oh, right! I forgot to tell you what my power is. I’m immortal.”

Understanding washed over Daisy’s face. “Well, that explains a lot.”

“Yeah, so don’t try and kill me, okay? It’ll just be a waste of both our time.”

Nathan reached into his pocket for his newest bag of skunk — which his killer also inexplicably hadn’t taken — and started rolling a joint. He noticed Daisy looking at him askance in the almost-dark.

“Oh, what, I’m not allowed to smoke a joint in my own house?” he asked, licking the paper. “I think I’m entitled to a little relaxation after a hard day of being murdered.”

Daisy couldn’t exactly argue with that, so Nathan lit his joint and then brought the lighter down to the cluster of candles on the ground between them.

“Why are you living at the community centre?” Daisy asked after a few minutes’ silence.

Nathan jerked his head to look at her. Hearing her ask that took him back to when his mum first kicked him out, and Kelly asked him almost exactly the same question, in a very different context.

“I mean, there are a million places you could have gone,” Daisy continued, “but you chose to live here, on a filthy sofa in a car park. Why not somewhere else?”

Nathan lay lengthwise on said filthy sofa, crossing his ankles on the armrest. He tried to ignore the shrink’s-office implication of the position. “Before the world ended, I was two days away from finishing my community service.”

“Oh?” Daisy said, and he could hear her trying to hide her judgment. “What for?”

“For eating some pick ‘n’ mix,” he said around his joint.

“Seriously?”

Nathan nodded. He thought about Beverley, and frowned to remember that he was dead now. That happened from time to time — he’d recall a minor character in his life, someone he didn’t give a shit about, and would suddenly feel sad that they were dead. He wondered if Bev had gotten a power in the storm. Maybe it gave him eyes in the back of his head.

“So why did you stay here?” Daisy asked. “I would have thought you’d want to get as far away as possible.”

“Look,” Nathan sighed, “just because we’re the last people on earth doesn’t mean we have to know every detail about each other’s lives.”

“Fair enough.”

Nathan took another drag. “Anyway, what were _you_ doing skulking around the community centre?”

“I thought we weren’t sharing,” Daisy pointed out.

Nathan rolled his eyes and waved her off.

“If you must know, I was scavenging,” she said. “I used to live on the other side of the estate, but I picked it clean — the shops were almost completely destroyed over there. I’m also a vegetarian, so I couldn’t eat everything I found.”

Nathan blew smoke out of his nose. “All the animals on earth are dead, and you’re worried about a tin of ham?”

“You don’t know that for certain. If there are three of us alive here, there must be other people in the world. And probably animals as well.”

“So, because a cow might be alive in China, you can’t eat meat that’s gonna go bad anyway?”

“Judging each other accomplishes nothing.”

Nathan shrugged. All this talk of meat was giving him the munchies. The bad thing about smoking skunk after the apocalypse was that it made you even hungrier than you already were all the bloody time. It was a good thing Nathan had so much past experience eating tiny, sporadic portions of absolute crap. Otherwise he probably would have starved to death at least a dozen times by now.

Visions of kebabs were poking him in the brain, and he needed to get his mind off them.

“Sorry for putting a gun to your head,” he said.

Daisy was quiet for a moment, as if she couldn’t quite believe he had apologized. Neither could Nathan, really — he didn’t do it often, and apocalypses were supposed to make you harder, not softer.

“I forgive you,” she said at last. “If I were in your situation, I probably would have done the same.”

Nathan hoped his doubtful expression came across in the low light.

“Well, I wouldn’t have a gun — I don’t believe in them,” Daisy clarified. “But I would certainly be very angry.”

Nathan scoffed. “Oh, come on. You’d probably throw a bouquet of wildflowers at them.”

“Well, if I could find a bouquet of wildflowers in this wasteland, I just might.”

Nathan laughed. Fuck, it had been too long since he’d done this. He’d forgotten how much he loved it — taking the piss, thinking of comebacks, just _talking_. And as much as he enjoyed being the center of attention, it made things so much more fun when the other person bit back. Daisy’s was a gentle, grazing type of bite, but it was better than nothing.

They sat there as night officially descended, the only light coming from the candles at their feet and Nathan’s dwindling joint.

“I thought I was the only one left,” Daisy said out of the blue — or rather, black. “I’m glad I’m not.”

Nathan didn’t respond. If this were some heartwarming film, he would have said he was glad too, and they would have smiled softly at each other, and some cheesy song would play over the end credits. But if he said that, he would be lying. He was always going to be the only one left, no matter how many people showed up in the interim. At least she had an end in sight.

“It must have been even harder for you,” Daisy said, and he wondered if she had somehow stolen Kelly’s power. “Thinking you’d be alone for all of eternity.”

Not if he got his ecstasy back.

“We should get some sleep,” Nathan said. “We need our beauty rest to track down a homicidal maniac tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Daisy said, tucking her legs up onto the chair. “Good night, Nathan.”

Nathan tossed aside what was left of his joint and left the candles burning, as apparently having a killer on the loose turned him into a toddler who needed his nightlight.

As soon as he closed his eyes, he remembered why he liked talking so much — he didn’t have to be alone with his thoughts. Thoughts like, if Daisy wanted to heal the world, would she want to repopulate it as well? Was she expecting them to shag for the greater good?

He wasn’t entirely opposed to the idea — she was cute, he was six months horny — but it felt too much like an obligation to really do anything for him. When the future of the human race was at stake, it put a lot of pressure on a guy.

It might not all come down to him, he reminded himself. There was at least one other man on the planet, if what Daisy said was true. But if he was going around randomly shooting people in the head, he probably wasn’t the best choice for repopulating the earth.

Neither was Nathan, if he was being honest with himself. Still, he wondered if all this was supposed to happen. If he was supposed to lose his ecstasy before he could use it. If he was supposed to keep living. If he was supposed to meet Daisy so they could become Adam and Eve and restart the world.

But he didn’t want to be Adam. He just wanted to be dead.

 

Nathan woke the next morning to the sensation of someone gnawing on his neck. Wow, this girl wasted no time. Fine, he would be Adam for five minutes.

He quickly changed his mind when he realized that this wasn’t the sexy kind of gnawing — unless Daisy was into some seriously kinky shit. This kind of gnawing didn’t say, “I want to shag your brains out.” Rather, it seemed to say, “I want to rip your brains out of your skull with my bare hands and eat them.”

The key difference was the excruciating pain.

Nathan blinked his bleary eyes and glimpsed a man’s balding head burrowing under his chin in the early morning light. He screamed and tried pushing the freak off him, but he was like a leech.

“Hey, get off of him!” shouted Daisy, who had apparently been woken up by the commotion. He could see her trying to pull the guy away by the scruff of his shirt, to no avail.

Nathan wriggled his arm behind him, which was difficult considering the cannibal currently chewing on his flesh was also pinning him to the sofa with his body weight. He could feel the gun sticking out of his waistband, and struggled to lift himself away from the sofa enough to get a good grip on it. He couldn’t decide if he should shoot the guy or himself.

Ultimately, he chose to shoot the guy — directly in the head. Brains splattered everywhere, and the psycho slumped heavily against Nathan’s chest, teeth finally loosening their grip on his neck. Nathan shoved the body to the ground and stood up. He and Daisy stared at each other. She had blood on her face.

“What the fuck?” Nathan shrieked, and then promptly fainted.


	3. Chapter 3

Daisy was staring down at him when he woke up. More specifically, two Daisies were staring down at him, and they both still had blood splattered on their faces.

“How long was I out?” Nathan asked, blinking aggressively until she narrowed down to one.

“A couple of minutes,” Daisy said.

“So I didn’t die?”

“Do you usually breathe when you’re dead?”

He had never really considered it, but he supposed they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of burying him the first time if he had been breathing. “I don’t think so.”

“Then you didn’t die.”

Nathan knew what that meant. He reached up to gingerly touch the spot on his neck where that maniac had been feasting, but he was surprised to find there was no wound there. He looked at Daisy.

“I healed it,” she said, holding up her hand and wiggling her fingers.

Nathan sighed with relief and sat up. “Thanks. I didn’t want to have to use my last bullet.”

Daisy raised her eyebrows.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, not in the mood to explain the intricacies of his power, which even he didn’t fully understand. “Jesus, what the fuck was that guy’s deal?”

“I don’t know,” Daisy said, glancing at the corpse lying face-down in a pool of blood a few feet away. “It’s almost like he was a zombie.”

Nathan scoffed. “This isn’t a zombie apocalypse, it’s just a regular apocalypse. Maybe the storm made him want to eat people. It made our probation worker go mental. If we hadn’t killed him, he would’ve …”

He trailed off as Daisy blinked at him. It was a good thing there were no cops to call in the apocalypse, or Nathan would already be in custody.

“Or maybe he was just on crystal meth,” he suggested. He only said it to change the subject, but it reminded him of something. He had been so distracted by having his flesh eaten that he had forgotten the most important aspect of this whole saga: “My ecstasy!”

“I don’t think he has it,” Daisy said as Nathan crawled over to the dead body.

“Did you check?” he asked, reaching into the guy’s pockets. “How do you know?”

“Because that’s not the man I saw yesterday.”

He stopped searching and looked at her. “You mean to tell me there’s _another_ violent psychopath wandering the estate?”

She nodded.

Nathan slumped back against the bottom of the sofa, picking up his gun from where he had dropped it and putting it back in his jeans. Daisy sat cross-legged beside him, avoiding any blood or brains, which was becoming increasingly difficult. They stared at the dead body in silence.

Nathan’s stomach rumbled. “Fuck, I’m starving.”

“Do you want some peas?” Daisy asked.

Nathan watched her as she rummaged through her canvas bag. His gaze lingered over her bare arms and the skin at her collarbone. Then she brushed her hair away from her neck and he came to a rather uncomfortable realization.

“This is probably gonna sound weird,” he said, licking his lips, “but I really want to eat you right now.”

Daisy looked up. “I beg your pardon?”

“I’m not being a pervert,” he clarified. “I mean, I really want to just bite all your fingers off one by one and eat them like carrot sticks.”

Daisy’s lip curled, and she nodded at the corpse on the ground. “You mean … like him?”

Nathan followed her gaze, and his eyes widened. “Oh shit, am I a zombie now?” he cried, pulling at his hair. “Since when are there zombies?”

Daisy rose carefully to her feet and backed away from him. “It’s okay. Maybe we can fix this.”

“How?!”

“Well, I’m not usually one to encourage suicide,” she said, “but shooting him in the head seemed to work, and you _are_ immortal. Maybe you’ll come back like you were before?”

Nathan reached for his gun, but paused before pulling it out. “No, I can’t. I only have one bullet left, and that’s for … something else.”

“Well, I would prefer it if you didn’t eat me!”

Nathan thought for a moment, then rushed over to his stash and found the old pack of tutti frutti gum he had taken from Simon. “Maybe if I chew this, it’ll stop the cravings,” he said, cramming three sticks into his mouth at once.

Daisy watched him as he chewed it. “Well? Is it working?”

Nathan shook his head. “No,” he said, voice muffled by the wad of gum. “Now I’m thinking about eating your eyeballs.”

She buried her face in her hands. “Nathan, I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but you have to kill yourself.”

“I can’t,” Nathan insisted, spitting the gum out of his mouth. It tasted horrible, mostly because it wasn’t living flesh.

“Why not? What situation could possibly be more dire than this?”

Nathan opened his mouth to speak, but was distracted by the sight of a man entering the car park. He appeared to be a few years past middle age, and was dancing to nonexistent music, an idiotic smile plastered across his face. He was either drunk, high, or mental — or all three at once.

Nathan pointed at him. “Is that the guy you saw yesterday?”

Daisy turned to look at the approaching figure, then back to Nathan. She nodded.

“Well, if I can’t eat you, then I’m sure as fuck gonna eat him.”

He stomped toward the man, who opened his arms as if he expected Nathan to hug him.

“You stole my drugs!” Nathan lunged at him, aiming to rip his throat out with his teeth. As soon as he was done eating this guy, he was going to take a pill, shoot himself in the head, and fuck off out of this world forever.

He didn’t get a chance to do any of those things, because the man put a hand on either side of Nathan’s face, and he immediately dropped dead.

 

He woke to the sound of people talking. He was lying on the sofa now, and the sun was brighter — as bright as it could be with so much smog in the air.

“He’s back,” he heard Daisy say.

Nathan looked over to see her sitting in the armchair, with that middle-aged dickhead standing next to her. He got a better look at him now — grey hair, camouflage jacket, awkward posture, and an apparent inability to look Nathan in the eye.

“Nathan, this is Eddie,” Daisy said. “Eddie, this is Nathan.”

“Nice to meet you,” Nathan said, lifting himself into a sitting position. “Couple questions. One, why did you kill me? Two, where are my drugs? Three, why did you kill me _again_?”

“Okay, Nathan, I understand that you’re angry,” Daisy said, “but I think you should give Eddie a chance to explain himself. We’ve been talking, and —”

“Seriously?” Nathan interrupted. “I’m dead for what, an hour, and the two of you become best mates?”

“It was an hour and a half, actually,” Eddie pointed out.

“Eddie, why don’t you tell Nathan about yourself?” Daisy suggested, probably noticing the murderous rage in Nathan’s eyes. “Nathan, Eddie has a power just like us.”

“What is it? The power to be a total cunt?”

“I can bring people back from the dead,” Eddie said, his blue eyes flashing between Nathan, Daisy, and the ground. “Except … whoever I bring back … they turn into a zombie.”

“So you saw the world end in a giant, cataclysmic shitstorm and thought, ‘You know what, this situation just isn’t shitty enough. Why don’t I add a few zombies into the mix,’” Nathan said.

“I didn’t know they would turn into zombies,” Eddie said defensively. He took a seat on the armrest of Daisy’s chair, suggesting this story would be a long one. “My wife and I survived the apocalypse — we had a doomsday bunker to prepare for 2012. It was the end of the Mayan calendar.”

“Guess they were off by a couple of years,” Nathan remarked.

“I installed a steel bunker in our garden to prepare,” Eddie continued. “We happened to be inside it, stocking it with supplies, when all of this ... happened. We survived for a while, but my wife got sick, and she died a few days ago.”

He paused to compose himself. Daisy patted him on the arm, while Nathan rolled his eyes.

“Something happened when I was carrying her body to bury her,” Eddie went on. “I touched her arm, and suddenly, she was alive again. I was so happy, I couldn’t believe I had this power. So I went out and resurrected everyone I knew.”

“And let me guess,” Nathan said. “They started trying to eat you.”

Eddie hung his head and nodded. “They seemed fine at first. But once I realized they were zombies, I had to start killing them. My wife, my best friend, my neighbor ...”

“Who’s that guy?” Nathan asked, nodding to the corpse which still lay at their feet.

“My postman,” Eddie said. “It’s a good thing you shot him in the head — that seems to be the only way to stop them. I’ve been trying to track them all down, which is how I ended up here. When I saw you sitting there yesterday, I thought you had to be one of them. I didn’t believe anyone else like me existed anymore.”

Nathan crossed his arms. “Next time, maybe double check that the person _isn’t_ a zombie before you blow their brains out.”

“You’re right,” Eddie said. “I wasn’t in my right mind. I’m sorry.”

“Apology not accepted,” Nathan said. “Now, where is my ecstasy?”

“Aren’t you wondering why you died when he touched you?” Daisy asked.

Nathan shrugged. “Do _you_ know why?”

Both Daisy and Eddie shook their heads.

“So why waste time theorizing when you could be giving me back my drugs?”

Eddie was looking at the ground again. He mumbled something Nathan couldn’t hear.

“What’s that? Squeak up!”

“I took them,” Eddie said, louder this time.

“You took —” Nathan ran his hands down his face and groaned. “Well, that explains why you were acting like such a touchy-feely weirdo earlier.”

“I thought they were sweets,” Eddie rushed to explain. “My wife used to love sweets that looked just like that. I was so happy when I saw them. I wanted to savor them, so I ate just one yesterday. But it made me feel so nice that I took the other one this morning. I was coming back here to see if you had any more.” He looked at Nathan hopefully. “Do you?”

Nathan slumped back on the sofa. “If I did, I wouldn’t be talking to you.”

The one time he found something that _wasn't_ sweets, and some twat decided to nick them because he wanted a sugar rush. He should have just swallowed the damn thing back at that junkie’s flat, and he wouldn’t even be here now.

He could hear Daisy spouting some nonsense about how they should get along and try not to judge each other, because they were all any of them had, and they could figure this out. But he was too busy piecing together what all of this meant to really listen to her.

“Hold on,” Nathan said, snapping his fingers. “Does this mean you were high when you touched me before?”

Eddie nodded. “Yeah. What does it matter?”

“Ecstasy reverses powers. So if your power is creating zombies by touching them, your inverse power must be _killing_ zombies by touching them.”

“Ecstasy reverses powers?” Daisy said, and Nathan witnessed the exact second she realized why he was so desperate for the stuff. She looked at him with her eyebrows bunched up and her mouth hanging open in the most disgustingly compassionate expression he had ever seen.

“Yes. And that” — he pointed at her face — “is exactly why I didn’t want to tell you.”

“Sorry,” Daisy said, struggling to put her face back into a neutral shape. “But wait a minute. How can we be sure you’re not still a zombie?”

“Because everything resets when I die. I’m pretty sure it all goes back to how it was when I first got the power.” He gave Eddie a dirty look. “You know, I had a pretty nice beard going before you killed me the first time.”

“Just to be absolutely positive,” Daisy said, “do you feel like you want to eat either of us?”

Nathan glanced back and forth between them, imagining what it would be like to gnaw on their limbs, lick the meat off their bones, rip their skin off with his teeth. It made him retch. He might even be a vegetarian now.

“Definitely not,” he said. “Weirdly, I’m craving more of that tutti frutti gum.”

Daisy handed him the pack, and he put two sticks in his mouth. He glared at Eddie, trying to figure out how his power might fix this situation. Bringing people back as zombies was pretty useless, but bringing people back as zombies with superpowers — that could be handy.

“Has the ecstasy worn off yet?” Nathan asked as he chewed.

Eddie looked embarrassed. “It’s getting there, I think.”

“Okay, so here’s the deal, Freddie.”

“Eddie.”

“Whatever. I’m still extremely pissed off at you. But maybe you can make it up to me.”

“How?”

“I’ve got this friend,” Nathan said. “Well, I _had_ this friend. He would probably tell you that we weren’t friends, but we were. Anyway, he had a power, just like us. He could turn back time. So I’m thinking, we dig him up, you bring him back to life, and he goes back and stops all this happening.”

“Stops _what_ happening?” Daisy wondered.

“Best case scenario, the apocalypse. If he can’t do that, maybe he can stop Eddie over here from creating zombies, shooting me in the head, and stealing my ecstasy. In that order.”

“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” Eddie said. “Some of the zombies can control their urges more than others. What if I wake him up and he tries to eat us?”

“Well, do you still have that gun you used to shoot me?”

Eddie looked bashful as he reached into his jacket and produced a handgun.

“Right,” Nathan said. “So you’ll shoot him in the head. Job done.”

“Or!” Daisy chimed in. “Maybe I could help.”

Nathan and Eddie looked at her expectantly.

“My power … maybe it works to cure people of being zombies,” she said. “If shooting them in the head works, maybe I could touch them on the head. It’s like a disease, isn’t it? This could be why I’m still here. Why we’re all here. To bring everyone back to life and then heal them. To start the world over again, without sickness or pain.”

She grinned at them, practically glowing with pride.

“Personally, I’m just here because I’m immortal, and some prick stole my ecstasy,” Nathan said. “Look, if you want to do that whole reviving the world thing, good for you. I’m sure you’ll win the Nobel Peace Prize. But don’t you think it would be quicker just to prevent all this happening in the first place?”

“He does have a point,” Eddie told her.

Daisy’s smile fell. “Fine,” she sighed. “We’ll try your thing first.”

“Where’s your friend’s body?” Eddie asked.

Nathan’s mind flashed back to the day after the world ended, when he realized their ghosts were gone for good. He couldn’t just leave them there to rot under all that rubble — especially after he had gotten a coffin and a funeral his first time around.

He had found Shaun’s body in the staff office and plucked the car keys from his pocket. His car had miraculously remained operational, so Nathan dragged the bodies out to it one by one. It took him all day to dig them out of the rubble, moving lockers and chunks of concrete until he could barely lift his arms to the steering wheel. He took Shaun, too — it was the least he could do for borrowing his car.

“I buried them. Him. All of them,” Nathan said. “Near where the old flyover used to be.”

He had thought it would be ironic. Or something.

“All right, let’s head out,” Eddie said, standing up.

Nathan nodded to the dead zombie postman still ruining the scenery. “Do you want to do anything with him?”

Eddie pondered it for a moment. “Let’s see what your friend does, and then we’ll worry about it. He was kind of a dick, to be honest.”

“Whoa,” Nathan said. “Eddie’s creeping out of his shell. You know, you remind me of another friend I used to have. He would never have taken my ecstasy, though. Maybe you can revive him, too, and he’ll give you a few pointers.”

“Uh … guys?” Daisy cut in. She was staring off toward what was left of the community centre.

Nathan and Eddie turned to see a crowd of at least a dozen people coming toward them at a steady pace. They weren’t slow and lumbering like the stereotypical Hollywood zombies, but this wasn’t _28 Days Later_ either. They had the manner of a guy on the street who wanted to hand you a leaflet about Jesus. But instead, they wanted to eat you.

Eddie fumbled for his gun and proceeded to shoot the zombies one by one. He hit six of them right in the head without missing — Nathan would be thoroughly freaked out if he wasn’t relieved not to be eaten — before he ran out of bullets and stood there staring into space.

“Well?” Nathan said, bouncing up and down like he had to piss. “What are you waiting for? Reload, Rambo!”

“I don’t have any more ammo,” Eddie said, backing away as the zombies got closer.

Daisy tapped Nathan on the shoulder and gestured to the back of his jeans.

“Are you insane?” he said. “I’m not wasting my last bullet on one of these freaks when there are five more of them that’ll eat us anyway!”

“No time to argue,” Eddie muttered, and took off running toward the far end of the community centre — he was surprisingly spry for a man of his age. Nathan and Daisy hurried after him.

They stopped short when they saw yet another group of zombies sauntering toward them from the other direction.

“Fuck,” all three of them said at once, before running into the rubble of the building and searching for somewhere to hide.

“Over here,” Nathan said, leading them to a storeroom in the corner which had miraculously remained standing, minus the ceiling. They crowded into it and closed the door.

As long as zombies couldn’t climb over walls, they should be fine in here. Of course, they had no food or water and nothing to defend themselves with except some spare paper towel rolls, but surely the hungry bastards would give up eventually … wouldn’t they?

“For fuck’s sake,” Nathan caught his breath long enough to say, “how many of those things did you make?”

“I lost count,” Eddie replied, tucking his useless gun back into his jacket.

They waited for several minutes, listening for any sign of movement on the other side of the door. Things seemed quiet, almost like they were back when each of them believed they were the only ones alive.

“Maybe we can make a run for it?” Daisy suggested. “Out the back way?”

She hadn’t even gotten the last word out before there was a heavy pounding from outside. The handle started to move, and all three of them heaved their bodies against the door to keep it closed.

Daisy winced. “Or maybe not.”


	4. Chapter 4

The door was rattling on its hinges like a fucking horror film, and they could hear the zombies on the other side moaning about wanting to eat their various body parts. Nathan would have expected a real-life zombie apocalypse to be a little more subtle.

“We’re going to need to come up with a plan,” he said. “You still feeling that ecstasy, Ed?”

Eddie grunted as he pushed his shoulder against the door. “A little.”

“Yeah? How do you feel about slapping these zombies to death?”

“All of them?” Eddie said. “I don’t know …”

“Maybe Mother Teresa here can help,” Nathan said, nudging Daisy. “Can you heal some of them?”

“I’m not sure it’s even possible,” she said.

“Well, what was all that earlier about healing the world?”

“In theory! But I’d rather not find out I’m wrong with a herd of bloodthirsty zombies chasing after me.”

At that moment, they lost some control of the door, and it opened far enough for one of the zombies to push his head in and snap at them like a crocodile. Daisy, who was closest to the opening, screamed and swatted at him, shoving him away with her palm flat against his forehead.

She was unsuccessful at pushing him out of the room, but her efforts weren’t a total failure. Just a few seconds after she touched him, his demeanor changed. He stopped trying to bite her and just stared at her, as if he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing.

“Who are you?” he asked, and it felt a lot like answering the phone and having the person who called you ask who they were speaking to. He looked behind him and let out a terrified cry. “Oh God, let me in! They’re going to eat me!”

The three of them exchanged a glance and silently agreed to let him in — actual zombies didn’t seem smart enough to pull any tricks. They let go of the door long enough for the man to scurry inside, then pushed it closed again as the rest of the zombies surged forward.

“Well, I suppose that answers that question,” Daisy panted.

Nathan squinted at their guest, who was currently cowering in the corner. He knew his voice had sounded familiar, but he hadn’t been able to get a good look at his face until now.

“Jeremy?”

The man blinked up at him. “Nathan? What are you doing here?”

“You know Jeremy?” Eddie asked Nathan.

“Yeah, he’s my mum’s … he used to live with my mum. How do you know him?”

“We used to play squash together.”

“Eddie? Oh, hi!” Jeremy greeted, as he seemed to start piecing things together. “You brought me back from the dead. What the hell happened?”

“It’s a long story, Jezza,” Nathan said. He looked at Eddie. “Hey, does this mean you brought my mum back, too?”

Eddie thought back. “I may have. Did she have dark hair?”

“Can you play catch-up later, please?” Daisy asked, struggling against the door. “We need to do something about this.”

“All right, here’s the plan,” Nathan told them. “I’ll run out and distract them, and you two start touching as many of them as you can.”

“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” Daisy asked him.

“I’m an immortal man with a death wish. I’m the perfect bait.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Jeremy offered.

Nathan recalled Jeremy, bollock-naked, pouncing on him and sniffing him like a dog. He couldn’t exactly find the usefulness in that — for this or any other situation.

“No, you’re all right,” Nathan told him. “Just stay in here and try not to get eaten.”

He and Daisy awkwardly switched places so that he could make a quick exit when they opened the door. The zombies were being very insistent now, and Nathan couldn’t exactly blame them. He hadn’t eaten anything but gum since yesterday afternoon, and there was a bag of cheese and onion crisps with his name on it once they were done here. He had planned to eat them as his last meal while he waited for the ecstasy to kick in, before he was rudely interrupted.

“Okay,” Nathan breathed, getting into position. “On the count of three. One … two … three!”

All three of them let go of the door, and Nathan shoved his way through the opening, knocking the closest zombie to the floor. He pushed through the crowd, dodging teeth and fingers as he went. One of the zombies grabbed him by his T-shirt and nearly had him, but he managed to pull away.

“Come and get me, you freaks!” he shouted, shifting back and forth as the zombies closed in on him. “Okay, guys! Now would be a good time to help me out!”

Daisy and Eddie emerged from the storeroom and approached the zombies from behind. Eddie smacked one of them across the cheek — all those squash matches with Jeremy had paid off — and it dropped dead immediately. Daisy, meanwhile, timidly rubbed her fingers on the side of an old woman’s head. She went from baring her teeth to blinking in surprise.

“I’m terribly sorry, dear,” she told Daisy. “I don’t know what came over me.”

Daisy patted her on the arm and directed her to the storeroom before moving on to the next one, while Eddie was busy killing his third. At this point, some of the zombies had turned away from Nathan to approach their newfound meals.

“Over here, shitheads!” Nathan screamed, drawing their gaze back over to him. He lifted up his shirt and slapped his stomach. “I’ve got the good stuff. You know you want it.”

He tried not to let it hurt his feelings that the zombies didn’t look very impressed. That’s when he noticed that one of them — the one Daisy was currently healing — was, indeed, his mum.

She looked around in confusion and gasped when she saw him. “Nathan? What’s going on?”

“I’ll explain everything later, Mum!” he called as one of the zombies came scarily close to biting him, before Eddie slapped it dead. “Jeremy’s in the storeroom!”

She looked like she wanted to say more, but Daisy pulled her away. Nathan dodged a zombie in a police uniform as he watched his mum disappear into the storeroom. Eddie slapped the guy, and he fell on his face. Nathan didn’t know if he was more relieved not to be eaten or not to be arrested.

They were making good progress, but Daisy was being far too slow with her part of the fight. She felt the need to comfort every zombie she healed, and gently lead them to safety before moving on to the next one.

This habit was catching up with her, as Nathan noticed one of the zombies — a stout man in striped pajamas and fuzzy slippers — approaching her while she was busy talking to a young girl she had just healed. Eddie was too far away to kill it, so Nathan shouted her name to warn her.

Daisy turned around at the sound of his voice, and the zombie caught her by both arms and leaned in to bite her. She pushed him away as far as she could, but she couldn’t reach his head to heal him.

“Help!” Daisy shouted.

Nathan looked over at Eddie, who was slapping zombies like his life depended on it — probably because it did. He noticed Daisy and started over to her, but was blocked by a trio of young women in cheerleader outfits. (Nathan didn’t have the time to wonder why Eddie had brought _them_ back to life.) They dropped like flies as Eddie pushed his way through them, but he tripped over a hunk of concrete as he approached Daisy and her hungry attacker.

Fucking Eddie. Absolutely useless.

Nathan knew he wouldn’t make it to her in time. It was getting harder and harder for Daisy to push the bastard away.

“Oh, fuck it,” he said, and reached into the back of his jeans.

The gunshot echoed through the ruins of the community centre. Daisy fell to the floor as the zombie let go of her, brains exploding from his head. Eddie, who was in the midst of picking himself up off the ground, turned toward the source of the sound and gaped.

“Check that out,” Nathan said, lowering his revolver. “Bullseye.”

They looked around and realized that there were no living zombies left. One very bewildered man in a doctor’s coat was wandering toward the storeroom after being healed. Otherwise, the floor was littered with lifeless bodies.

Daisy stood up and approached Nathan, stepping over rubble and corpses.

“That was your last bullet,” she told him, as if he didn’t remember.

“Yeah, well, I figure I’m just as likely to find more bullets as I am to find more ecstasy,” Nathan said with a shrug, putting the gun back in his waistband. “Also, you know, I didn’t want you to get eaten.”

Daisy wrapped her arms around him in a rib-crushing hug. “Thank you.”

“All right, no need to get all touchy-feely about it,” he said, smiling in spite of himself. He had to admit, it felt pretty good to be a hero.

 

Not long after that, the three of them sat side-by-side on the sofa, passing the bag of cheese and onion crisps between them and waiting for Eddie’s ecstasy to wear off. The former zombies were milling around the car park like they were at a cocktail party, swapping stories of their cannibalistic urges.

“Six months of fuck all,” Nathan said, “and we thwart a zombie apocalypse in one day.”

“And now we get to heal the world,” Daisy said cheerfully.

“Whoa, not so fast. Remember what we were on our way to do before all this happened? My friend who can rewind time? Stopping the apocalypse?”

“Right. That,” Daisy said, sounding far too disappointed at the prospect of the world not ending.

“I know why you don’t like that plan,” Nathan said. “It’s because if the apocalypse never happens, that means you’ll never meet me. Don’t worry, I’ll tell Curtis to introduce us in the new timeline."

Daisy sighed. “Why did you have to save me?”

“You loved it,” Nathan said, shaking the final contents of the crisp bag into his mouth.

It was too bad Daisy was so hell-bent on helping people and doing the right thing. Nathan thought she would make a pretty good addition to the gang, if she could bring herself to actually commit a crime. Maybe Curtis could do something about that, too.

Beside him, Eddie slapped his knees and stood up. “Right. Should we head out?”

The flyover had collapsed when the world ended, simultaneously destroying the environmental monitoring station — which Nathan still didn’t quite believe was real in the first place. He had found a clear patch of ground not too far away, and dug five graves beside each other.

“Which one is it?” Eddie asked when they got there, leaning on the shovel.

Nathan stood scratching his head. He had placed a piece of rubble to mark where he had dug each of the graves, but he hadn’t identified them by name, and couldn’t for the life (or death) of him remember whose was whose.

“We might have to play graveyard roulette,” he said.

This turned out to be more difficult than Nathan expected, as the bodies were nearly unrecognizable after six months of decay. The first one they dug up was Alisha — he could tell from what was left of her hair. Next was Simon, judging by the way his jumpsuit was zipped all the way up to his neck. Then came Kelly, as he recognized from her trainers.

Nathan had to turn away after every exhumation, to retch over the smell and hang his head between his legs as he came to terms with the fact that his friends had been rotting in the ground while he was getting high and shooting himself in the head like an idiot.

Daisy placed a hand on his shoulder, and he shrugged it away.

“The next one’s definitely Curtis,” he said, standing upright and taking the shovel from Eddie. “I buried the probation worker last.”

Sure enough, the next body had its jumpsuit tied around its waist, with a cross and a Saint Christopher medal around its neck. Nathan looked up and nodded. Eddie jumped down into the grave and leaned over Curtis’s body. He covered his nose with the collar of his shirt and reached out with his other hand.

“Whoa, wait a minute,” Nathan said, grabbing Eddie’s arm. “How does this work, anyway? Will he come back like he was before he died, or are we gonna be talking to a rotting corpse here?”

“He’ll be back to normal,” Eddie told him. “All the zombies you saw back there were rotting when I resurrected them.”

Nathan looked at Daisy. “Are you ready to do your thing when he wakes up?”

She reached out her hand, and he helped her down into the grave. She rubbed her palms together, as if they required charging. “I’m ready.”

Nathan nodded to Eddie, who once again reached out to touch the body. His fingers curled around what was left of Curtis’s hand. There was an almost immediate reaction, as Curtis’s flesh seemed to paint itself back onto his body. The muscles reemerged on his bare arms, and the hollows of his cheek filled out. After only a handful of seconds, it was as if Curtis just happened to be taking a nap at the bottom of a hole in the ground.

The three of them stood there silently, waiting for something to happen. Nathan wondered for a moment whether zombies took just as long to come back to life as he did when he died. He quickly learned that the answer was no, they didn’t.

Curtis’s eyes burst open, and he gasped. He sat bolt upright, looking around in bewilderment as dirt fell off his shoulders.

“If I may,” Daisy said, kneeling down beside Curtis. She placed her hand on the front of his head and rubbed it for a few seconds. “Now, do you feel like you want to eat us?”

Curtis looked at her like she was insane. “No.”

“Perfect,” she said, standing up and brushing off her dress.

Nathan cleared his throat and offered Curtis a hand. “Hey, man. It’s good to see you again.”

“What the fuck is going on?” Curtis asked, ignoring Nathan’s hand and standing up on his own. His legs were uncharacteristically shaky at first, but he quickly regained his balance.

“Well, you already know about the world ending. And me surviving it,” Nathan said. “What you don’t know is that I wasn’t the only one. Surprise!” He waved his hands in the air. “Eddie over here can bring people back from the dead. The only problem is that they become zombies. But the good news is that Daisy here can cure people of illnesses, and that apparently includes zombie brain. So you were a zombie for a second there, but now you’re back to normal.”

He stopped to catch his breath, while Curtis stared at him with his arms crossed.

“So anyway, the reason we wanted to bring you back was to ask if you could maybe do your little” — he whistled — “and stop all this happening in the first place? That would be great."

“You prick!” Curtis groaned, running a hand down his face. “How many times do I have to tell you that’s not how it works? And even if I could turn back time, how am I supposed to know how to prevent the apocalypse? I don’t even know what caused it.”

“So I take it that’s a no?” Nathan asked.

Curtis threw up his hands. “You seriously brought me back to life for this?”

“What? You’re not happy to be back?”

“To _this_?” Curtis said, gesturing around them.

Nathan supposed he had a point. After all, he had just spent the past six months trying desperately to escape all of this. To be fair, though, he also believed he would be alone for all of eternity. Not exactly the same situation.

“Misery loves company,” Nathan said, mock-punching Curtis on the arm.

Curtis glared at him.

“Sorry, mate,” Nathan said with a sigh. “Well, that’s that, I suppose. It wouldn’t be fair to resurrect the others. Just because we don’t want to be alone doesn’t mean they should have to suffer. I mean, I don’t have a choice. I could be stuck here forever. But that doesn’t mean I have to take their choice away.”

He half meant it, but the other half of him was secretly hoping he could coax a little sympathy out of Curtis and trigger his power. Based on the fact that they were all still standing there and nothing had changed, it didn’t seem to have worked.

That’s when they heard Eddie speak up from somewhere nearby. “Oh,” he said. “So you didn’t want me to bring all of these people back as well?”

They looked around and realized that, at some point during this conversation, Eddie had disappeared from the hole they were in. Nathan, Curtis, and Daisy climbed out to discover him emerging from Kelly’s grave.

Nathan was about to ask what he’d done, when he got his answer in the form of three familiar heads peeking out of their respective graves with looks of utter confusion on their faces.

Alisha pointed at Eddie. “Did this guy just bring us back to life?”

“I feel strange,” Simon said, nervously smoothing his hair.

“Why the fuck do I want to eat all of you?” Kelly asked.

“Oh, dear,” Daisy said, rushing over to touch them.

 

That evening, they all stood looking out on the sad excuse for a lake. Eddie had yet to resurrect anyone else, as they were still grappling with the ethics of the entire situation. The rest of the gang seemed conflicted about their return to the living world, and Curtis had his own internal struggle about whether or not to bring Nikki back. It was like the opposite of deciding whether to take someone off life support.

Eddie had apologized profusely, and Nathan had sufficiently chastised him. But privately, he was grateful to have everyone back, with no one but Curtis technically allowed to be angry at him.

“It would be nice if things weren’t so shitty,” Kelly pointed out.

“Maybe we’re here for a reason,” Simon said, and Daisy seemed to brighten. “Maybe we’re meant to change things.”

“That’s the spirit, Barry,” Nathan said, passing his joint to Kelly. “I mean, it’s not like we’re resurrecting a bunch of useless nobodies. A lot of these people probably have powers. Maybe some of them could be useful.”

“Like what?” Alisha asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe somebody can put buildings back together with their mind, or create three-course meals out of nothing, or build a rocket ship to take us to another planet.”

“And in the meantime, I can heal people,” Daisy chimed in.

“Just warning you guys now,” Nathan said, “that’s all she ever talks about.”

As the sun went down, they decided to leave further deliberations until the morning. Most of the zombies Daisy had healed — including Nathan’s mum and Jeremy — were already off to check on their own homes. Nathan told them not to get their hopes up.

Before settling in for the night, they finally carried the zombie postman away from the spot where he’d died, and Nathan put down cushions and blankets for everyone who wasn’t crowded onto the sofa. They gave the armchair to the little old lady, who turned out to be Eddie’s aunt.

It reminded Nathan of the first night after the world ended. This time, however, he comforted himself with the knowledge that they would all be there when he woke up.

Of course, there were still other things he wasn’t so sure about. Like whether any of the people Eddie brought back had powers that would actually prove useful. Or how long they would be able to survive on canned food and tutti frutti gum. Or whether he would ever find more ecstasy, or more bullets for his gun — and whether he even wanted to.

“Hey, guys,” he stage-whispered after everyone had been quiet for several minutes. “Just look on the bright side. At least we don’t have to do our community service.”

“Fuck, Nathan, I was almost asleep,” Kelly groaned, while Curtis threw a cushion at him.

Whatever happened, one thing was certain — he wouldn’t be alone.

**Author's Note:**

> This started with me wanting to write Nathan as the last person on earth (definitely influenced by The Umbrella Academy), but I couldn't think of a non-depressing ending, so I decided to add other characters. That somehow turned into a 13,000-word zombie story. We've all been there, right? 
> 
> The image of Nathan on the sofa was influenced by the classic Twilight Zone episode ["Time Enough at Last."](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/15/9d/e1/159de1d32290bb1e2f193e86e0dd4b5c.jpg)
> 
> I'm on [Tumblr](https://myrtlebroadbelt.tumblr.com/).


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